January 27, 2014

Column: Obama Needs to Do Less Finger-Wagging and More Apologizing

President Obama's policies continue to produce results that are the opposite of what he promises, yet he brazenly cites the abysmal state of (SET ITAL) his (END ITAL) economy to announce -- indignantly -- that he will double down on his failures.

Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven -- notorious leftist professors who devised a sinister plot to overburden the American economy to the point of collapse and then replace it with a socialist system -- would be quite proud of their understudy.

Obama's policies are drowning America in debt, unemployment, dependency and despair, yet he blames us for his failures -- as if he's been an innocent bystander -- and says he's going to ride to the rescue on his unconstitutional horse of unilateral executive orders to restore "equality" by fiat.

Even if Obama could get Congress to go along with his scheme to further burden success, opportunity, small businesses and major producers in this country and even if it were a desirable state of affairs for the tyrannical hand of government to decide how assets and income are divided among citizens, history conclusively shows that such socialist and communist ideas lead to increased poverty.

Obama is probably going to cite a recent Pew Research Center poll that supposedly indicates that most Americans want the government to take action to reduce income disparities among Americans. Even if we can take this poll at face value, it doesn't necessarily mean Americans want government just to confiscate wealth from some and transfer it to others. But it wouldn't be that surprising if they did favor action along those lines, given the left's 75-year systematic assault on capitalism, the free market and our founding American principles.

But David Harsanyi, a senior editor of The Federalist, points out that Obama is omitting a significant factor in the equation. Most Americans, says Harsanyi, still believe in upward mobility, and empirical evidence shows that upward mobility still exists as much as it did decades ago. Though Obama and his fellow socialists want us to believe that the American economy is a finite pie -- a zero-sum game -- the reality is that people move up and down the income ladder all the time. Many of yesterday's poor are today's middle class, and a significant number of them are wealthy.

In fact, Obama's oppressive spending, taxing and regulation exacerbate income inequality and impede upward mobility. The way out of our economy malaise is to reduce the federal government's chokehold on the private sector and producers, expand opportunity, increase the pie and unleash the possibility of growth across the board.

Do people think America is invincible just because it is named America or because of its unique constitutional guarantees of liberty through limited government? Do they think that socialists can continue to overburden the private sector, ignore our founding principles and destroy our liberties without tragic economic consequences?

America has never been about guaranteeing equality of income; it's about equality of opportunity. That's because human beings are born with God-given rights of liberty and because unleashing such liberties invariably produces the most economic good for the most people.

These dangerous ideas that Obama keeps pounding to forcibly redistribute income are anathema to the American dream, incompatible with liberty and devastating to prosperity, no matter what Cloward, Piven and Obama propagandize to the contrary. They are part of Obama's big lie, and they have to be beaten back, with vigor.

It's time that Obama be held to account for his miserable failures. We can't let him pretend he is not the primary causal agent in the ongoing economic disaster we are experiencing in this country.

This is Obama's economy, and he's sapping the economic lifeblood from this country, its businesses and its entrepreneurs. He has presided over -- and caused -- the worst recovery in a half-century. Actual unemployment is frighteningly, horrifyingly high -- because of his policies, with minorities being the hardest hit. He is destroying America's health care system, driving people against their will out of the private insurance system, severing people's ties to their doctors, reducing their access to care, reducing their choices of care and greatly increasing the individual cost of care and the cost to government of health care. Everything about Obamacare has been a premeditated Obama lie.

Before anyone listens to Obama about any major new policy initiatives, he must be held to account for his homicide of the American health care system and the critical injuries he's inflicted on the economy, as well as a host of other failed policies he's engineered and false promises he's made.

Sen. Ted Cruz is hardly being facetious with his suggestions that Obama apologize in the State of the Union address for his Obamacare lies and answer questions about Benghazi, the political targeting of conservative groups by his Internal Revenue Service, and other abominations.

This time, the Republican establishment should not leave Cruz hanging out by himself but join him in demanding accountability from President Obama.